So... Stalkers.

First off, I have not read through the entire thread.

I think that any boost to stalkers should come in the form of improvement to stalker tools, not an increase on direct survivability or damage/buff modifiers.


Here are some interesting ideas that cross my mind:

A) Placate gives the player a 5 second 500% recharge buff. The effect of this would be dependant on how much recharge you have in your build. If all your powers happen to have 95% recharge, and you are running hasten, it would be as good as good as speeding recharge of powers for up to 11.75 seconds (after the 5 seconds are through.) Without any enhancement you are buying yourself 20 seconds on all powers after the 5 seconds are done.

This includes the recharge of Placate itself, as well as any survival click power, attack or buildup.

This would give placate not just increase the utility of Placate, a stalker identity tool, but also make the stalker "move faster" in the shadows. Even if you get knocked out of the shadows you still will benefit from the recharge buff for the full 5 seconds. It for sure makes Placate much more useful in teams.

B) Alternatively, not conjointly, reduce the recharge of Placate and to 40 seconds base and make it a 3 target cone. This would allow for more often use of Placate and less chance of being knocked out of shadows by the neighbors of your target.

C) Make hide, the power, grant users a global run/jump/fly enhancement, about 100%, doubling the effect of any travel power you may have active, but only while hidden. This is more of an utility boost and may work cool with any other change.

D) My final option right now is to give all non T1 or T2 non-AoE attacks a chance to proc Placate effect + Stealth to enable a critical.


My main idea here is make stalkers work more like their anime equivalent. You know, those ninjas and other odd characters that show up, poof out, and strike again extremely fast and often. "Often" being the key word here.

I really enjoy my stalkers as is, but I would never argue against buffing them.

I think increasing the team crit range would help.

What I really think needs to happen is make placate a pbaoe. Also, increase their crit from x2 to x3 much like some weapons in D&D.

I like Starsman's ideas more than a staight buff to damage. Let stalkers *stalk.* I never liked them much because you only get a big hit once in a while then you're a second class scrapper. Placate should definately be an AoE or 5 targets. The recharge idea is great; stalkers should be more deft at moving in and out of the shadows. 100% bonus to movement in shadows? Well, if you say so. Sounds high to me, but I still like the direction your taking them. Light, fast and hard hitting, with more of a stick-and-move feel than toe-to-toe.

Make Stalker criticals automatic for any target that is held, asleep or stunned?

Edit: I just realized how that would carve AVs like Romulus Augustus into ribbons very quickly... rather, double the crit rate for helpless targets.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

Whatever happens, I prefer Stalkers to play more like Blappers with some defense and mez resistance rather than increase survivability to make a Scrapper clone.

I've made quite a few Stalkers to lvl 50. I've made Dual Blade/Nin 50, Spine/Nin 50, Spine/Energy Aura 50, Claw/Will 50, Ninja Blade/Nin 50, and Electricity/Will 50.

I am not a Stalker expert but here's some of my thoughts:

1. Increase Team Critical Buff radius. My logic is if the current 30' radius doesn't "impress" other teammates, I can't see how a larger radius is going to harm.

2. Increase Build Up buff to 100%.


Wishlist: Maybe reduce Stalker's re-hide recharge from 8s to 6s. :P


I like the team buffs but I just wish it's larger. I can live with less HP, less damage scale than Scrapper, less aoe potential. I like it how Stalker has more critical chances.

It's already unresisted in PvP (kind of like all criticals from Stalkers and Scrappers, all debuffs from Defenders, and a portion of all damage from Blasters should be).

Stalker survivability is fine as it is. I've at times thought that the hit point increase the AT received with the rest of their buffs a couple years ago wasn't really needed, but I also tend towards defense sets for stalkers instead of resistance and regen sets that get more out of the hit point boost, so I'm biased. Increasing the hit point cap isn't really ideal because the goal is to keep the AT unique, not turn it into a sneaky Scrapper.

I'm all for at least experimenting with increasing the Build Up bonus to 100%. That adds a healthy dose of upfront damage on its own. Making the crit bonus damage unresistable adds too many headaches to think about. Increasing the crit bonus multiplier by a full integer would almost certainly be overkill, but toying with some small increase might be worth consideration. We might run the numbers on something like maintaining the current crit rate and increasing the crit multiplier to 2.5 or 2.25 and work our way from there based on whatever sort of overall damage increase we're aiming at.

I can't support the idea of having a scaling crit based on number of enemies in range. I understand the idea thematically, but consider it a mechanical challenge that might not really provide as much benefit as the effort that would need to be expended. The crit rate based on team size provides for a definite limit on what the maximum crit rate can possibly be under ideal circumstances and a definite increase in damage based on the size of the team. Setting the crit rate based on number of enemies in an area requires enforcing a cap on how much benefit can be gained, either by setting a limited area the enemies have to be within to achieve the benefit or a hard cap beyond which the bonus can't go--likely both, providing for a maximum number of critters that provide a crit rate bonus within a defined area. So far, that's similar to how team crits work, but then come the complications.

Since the number of critters is (generally) more than a team can bring to the fight, each individual critter would end up needing to (likely) supply a smaller bonus to the crit rate than the AT currently gets from each individual teammate. Not every team is going to be herding masses of critters into a tight area, while most teams tend to stay at least relatively close together. (Whether or not they stay within 30 feet of each other is debatable, but I'm about to get to that.) For that reason, a swap like this would work better for one team playstyle than another with only a little benefit to a soloist. That benefit ends up cut short by the fact that in those herding teams, those herds get decimated by a team's AoEs, anyway. Also, while it's debatable whether or not most teams stay within 30 feet of each other, it's generally true that a team stays fairly tightly packed against tough encounters like AVs and Monsters. By swapping from a teammate-based to an enemy-based scaling crit rate, the Stalker ends up losing out on bonus damage against single hard enemies, when it is the most useful, in exchange for a bonus against multiple weaker enemies--something that the AT isn't really designed around dealing with, anyway, if the comparative lack of AoEs is an indication. (Almost every Stalker set has an AoE or two, but a number of those are balanced around being single target attacks, anyway.)

THAT means a system that would end up working like, say, Invincibility, with a front-load of bonus for smaller enemy encounters that diminishes for larger enemy encounters. Maybe that could be made to work, but I just think that's a lot of effort for trivial--if any--return when the current system already works very well.

Regarding the current Terror and -ToHit benefit of Assassination as it stands, the only real problems I have are that the Demoralize doesn't kick in if the enemy drops. It's a strange catch that provides for strategic choices (which are good, don't get me wrong), but is really hard to understand thematically. When "Joe is dead, man! He just DIED, right there, right in front of me, in no time flat!" doesn't evoke as much fear as "Man, something just poked Joe in the foot!", headscratching is bound to occur.

I see little reason to change them, honestly.

I do agree that there should be some kind of team buff that is connected to a successful AS, OR a Stalker in Hide (kind of like a "Scout the Enemy" bonus a la Tactics). Instead of the self-buffs blasters get for successful attacks, the buffs stack on the teammates as the Stalker pops out of the woodwork and administers a beatdown.

But as far as surviveability and damage? It ain't broke, don't try and fix it.

While the exact range is up for debate, increasing the radius of the crit range seems like the suggestion with the most consensus and (Standard Code Rant) seems the easiest to implement and the least likely to break things. While increasing the damage modifier seems to make sense, there is a valid chance that it would pull Elec and Spines too far ahead of the rest of the primaries and require further balancing of their damage.

The only changes that need to happen are the following:

Automatic crit for the assassin strikes (outside of hide), and increased chance to crit for tier 8 and 9 attacks. Add an additional crit (triple damage aside from any necessary adjustments for certain powers like ET) from hide.